Shan paced along the wall, offering polite exclamations over the distinguished visitors in the images. At Jiao’s door he pushed aside a windbreaker with Jiao’s name, ostensibly to view another photo, making sure it dropped to the floor. He was out of sight of the woman as he bent to retrieve it, and quickly searched the pockets. He found them empty, but he paused over the embroidered badge over the breast pocket. It showed a red hammer over a white chorten, encircled by the words Safety in Serenity. The secretary noticed his interest in it as he hung the jacket back on its peg.

“From an old job,” she explained.

Back outside, Shan walked along the perimeter of the compound and found himself facing the caged Tibetans. None of them would make eye contact with him. He took out his gau and murmured the mani mantra several times. Heads snapped up. Three men darted to the wire in front of him.

“We didn’t do anything!” the nearest said in a plaintive tone. “We just want work! I need to feed my family!” Another man produced a little red book as if to prove his loyalty. He was, no doubt, a graduate of a reeducation camp.

“Don’t argue with them,” Shan said. “The director will soon realize he can’t treat his best workers this way.”

“The director?” asked the third, older Tibetan. “It wasn’t the director, it was that damned deputy of his. At least the director overrruled him when he said we would have to take all our meals in here.”

“Tell me,” Shan said, with a worried glance toward the high road again, “were any of you here on that first day, when they leveled the standing stones?”

The man with the book turned and called out, summoning a compact middle-aged man in a herder’s coat. “Where are the old stones they pushed down last October?” Shan asked him.

“Gone. Back to the gods, sir,” the man explained.

“To the gods?”

“There was a great long crack in the ground that led toward the cave shrine from the standing stones, a half-mile long and who knows how deep. My grandmother said such things were openings to the bayal, to the land of bliss where the gods waited for the human world to improve. But the director said that was to be our first task, to fill it in and cover all traces since it would be a distraction to the engineers. So he had all those stones pushed into it, even the ones that had old writing and images cut into them. Then he ordered more big boulders to be pushed in and block the crack and used all the gravel that had been brought in for the roads, so the bulldozers could drive right across. All gone now.”

“The cave is gone too,” Shan observed.